BUSINESS and the businessman play a more important role in American
life than in that of any other country. Also unique is the American system
of higher education, which at the undergraduate level combines in a
peculiarly American mixture elements of three types of European institutions: the university, the lycée or gymnasium, and the non-university
technical school.1 Within this framework the United States continues beyond the secondary school its great experiment in education, providing
some combination of general and practical education to a large proportion of its citizens. More than half of the students then move out into the
world of business.2

Against this background, it is not surprising to find that academic
business education has been more extensively and highly developed in
the, United States than anywhere else. The United States, it is fair to say,
is the first country in the world to prepare young people, formally and
on a large scale, for careers in business.3 The American business school
has become an object of study for a stream of visitors from all parts of
the free world, and some of its features are now being fitted into the edu-

It is not correct, however, to assume that the early development of business education in
the United States had no counterparts in Europe or that various forms of a professional type
of business education did not exist in some other countries before the Second World War. See
the learned and interesting paper by Fritz Redlich, "Academic Education for Business," The
Business History Review, XXXI (Spring, 1957), 35-91; cf. also Heinz Hartmann, Education for
Business Leadership: The Role of the German "Hochschulen" ( Organization for European Economic
Cooperation, 1955), and
James A. Bowie, Education for Business Management ( 1930), chaps. 4
and 5.

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